The present invention relates generally to processing an information stream and more particularly to presenting portions of an information stream.
It is oftentimes desirable to be able to index an information stream and then later to access the information stream based on the indexing activity. Consider a concrete example where the setting is a marketing research effort.
Sociologists engaging in market research often observe focus groups to understand behavior. They take written notes as a complement to a video recording of a session. Conventionally, moderators study the behavior of the focus group. The moderators may synchronize their watches to the video time so that they can correlate their observations and notes with the video recording when they review the video.
In one scenario, a marketing researcher could observe members of a focus group unwrapping a prototype package. During the session, the focus group moderator records video of the participants' actions while unwrapping the package, making notes of important events and flagging them for later review. For example, the moderator may expect to see certain events such as “uses scissors,” “removes foil,” and so on. Each time, a member of the focus group “uses scissors” to open the package, one or more moderators will note the time of the activity in her notebook. If a member of the focus group “removes foil,” the time of occurrence of that activity is noted in a notebook.
A subsequent review of the video recording and the moderators' notes may require substantial effort to collate and organize the information. This effort can be especially tedious if it is also necessary to correlate the noted events recorded in the various notebooks. This might require searching through the potentially many hours of one or more video recordings to obtain snippets of video corresponding to the times of the events noted in the notebooks from many moderators.
A need therefore arises to facilitate the presentation of recorded information. There is a need for the ability to identify noted events in the recorded information and the ability to access the recorded information at the times corresponding to the noted events.